Gates still tops the world’s 946 Billionaires rich list – but not for long

March 13, 2007 Forbes magazine does great lists. This week it published a list of the world’s richest people and found there are a record 946 billionaires on the planet and Bill Gates is still numero uno – in a world where success is equated with the accumulation of dollars, no-one plays the game quite as well as Gates, who also donates more money to charity than anyone else in history. Gates has been the world’s richest man for 13 years but could lose the mantle to Mexican Carlos Slim Helu who added an astonishing US$19 billion to his net worth in 2006 and is now just US$7 billion shy of top spot. This year, there were 178 new billionaires and 32 who dropped off the list. The average billionaire is 62 years old, two years younger than in 2005 and 60% of list members made their fortune from scratch. The whole fascinating story can be found here.

Mike grew up thinking he would become a mathematician, accidentally started motorcycle racing, got a job writing road tests for a motorcycle magazine while at university, and became a writer. As a travelling photojournalist during his early career, his work was published in a dozen languages across 20+ countries. He went on to edit or manage over 50 print publications, with target audiences ranging from pensioners to plumbers, many different sports, many car and motorcycle magazines, with many more in the fields of communication - narrow subject magazines on topics such as advertising, marketing, visual communications, design, presentation and direct marketing. Then came the internet and Mike managed internet projects for Australia's largest multimedia company, Telstra.com.au (Australia's largest Telco), Seek.com.au (Australia's largest employment site), top100.com.au, hitwise.com, and a dozen other internet start-ups before founding Gizmag in 2002. Now he writes and thinks.